Some day I’ll meet the engineer who designed the MG brush rigging, and I’ve promised myself I’m going to kick his nuts up around his ears for every time I had to try swapping out brushes at 2 am without a stubbie. But, at the same time, I’d be more than happy to buy a round or two for whoever came up with a PMS item that gave us a legitimate reason to order liquid nitrogen. As there are a multitude of uses for liquid nitrogen aboard ship (very few of them having anything to do with it's intended use), we tried to make the most of it when it came due.
We always ordered about five times as much as we thought we’d need, and that seemed okay to everyone. It would show up in these little tan bullet-proof canisters we called “doozers” for some reason, along with a set of bad-ass gloves. There were the usual pranks, like freezing stuff and dropping it to watch it shatter (ballcaps and qual cards worked the best), as well as the occasional soda can or two that needed cooling. But nothing tops the time we discovered what happens if it comes in contact with seawater.
If you just spray some into the harbor, it makes lots of bubbles and a dense white cloud, kind of like tossing dry ice in the punch bowl. We found this out, sort of by accident, one night when we were hauling the doozers down from the pier. Pretty much all the offwatch nucs were topside, and the general consensus was that this phenomena warranted further study.
For “stage two”, we filled up an empty soda can and dropped it in. It caused a much more violent reaction when it hit the water, but not enough to convince us to stop while we were ahead. One of the cranks also happened to be topside, so we sent him belowdecks to find something with a lid. He came back a few minutes later with an empty peanut butter jar, which we promptly filled up, capped off, and tossed over the side.
There were four or five of us on the brow, watching expectantly as the jar sank. At first, nothing seemed to be happening. But then we saw a big green bubble rapidly rising from the depths. I would guess it was about five feet wide when it got to the surface, where it erupted just like a depth charge. We didn't get out of the way in time, and ended up getting soaked. I had to spend the rest of the duty day in wet, smelly dungarees, but it was worth it.
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3 comments:
They are actually called Dewars (like the Scotch Whisky).
I was working at a gas turbine power plant in the California boonies a couple of years ago. We were using liquid nitrogen to shrink bearings or some stupid thing like that, when one of the plant operators came out with a plastic tub of cream and some strawberries. He stuck the hose in the tub and made ice cream by stirring as the LN2 bubbled through the cream.
While I was in the control room, eating some of the ice cream, I learned that he was a nuke electrician back in his navy days. You wirebiters were always coming up with shit like that.
Yeah....MMC came up to the nitrogen rig on on the pier one night when I had the watch at 0 dark thirty. He had an big(several gallon) empty white plastic bottle that was used for transporting the N2 below deck. It had a screw on top. He also had a roll of eb green and an evil grin. He filled the bottle and taped the cap on with lots of eb green (is there any other way?)
He then threw it into the water of Pearl Harbor....and stepped back. So did I.... a little further than he did. It took about 30 seconds for that bottle to come screaming out of the water. It got about thirty feet in air tilted left and proceeded at a high rate past #1 scope which was fully raised and across the short distance to impact on the bridge of the skimmer opposite us.
That was almost as much fun as time we blew our sanitary tanks all over the tender.
I am so with you on calibrating the designer of the MG brushes. Never got to play with the liquid nitrogen, though. I must've gaffed that PMS...
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